The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner - Softcover

Nicol, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1535813172 ISBN 13: 9781535813174

Publisher: Gale and the British Library, 1822

Synopsis

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1822 edition. Excerpt: ... 50 CHAPTER V. Voyage to Granada--Treatment of the NegroesDancing and Songs--Long-Shorers chiefly Scots and Irishmen--Anecdote of a Welshman. My next voyage was on board the Cotton Planter, commanded by Captain Young, bound for the island of Granada. I was very happy under Captain Young; he had been long in the Mediterranean trade, where he had lost his health, and every year made a voyage to the West Indies, to avoid the English winters. We sailed in the month of October, and arrived safe at St George's, Granada. I wrought a great deal on shore, and had a number of blacks under me. They are a thoughtless, merry race; in vain their cruel HEGU0ES. 51 situation and sufferings act upon their buoyant minds. They have snatches of joy, that their pale and sickly oppressors never know. It may appear strange, yet it is only in the West India islands that the pictures of Arcadia are in a faint manner realized once in the week. When their cruel situation allows their natural propensities to unfold themselves on the evenings of Saturday and Sabbath, no sound of woe is to be heard in this land of oppression--the sound of the JBenji * and rattle, intermixed with song, alone is heard. I have seen them dancing and singing of an evening, and their backs sore from the lash of their cruel task-masters. I have lain upon deck of an evening, faint and exhausted from the heat of the * The Benji is made of an old firkin, with one end out, covered with shark skin, and beat upon with two pieces of wood. The rattles are made of a calabash shell, and a few small pebbles in it, fixed on a wooden handle; these they shake to the time of the Benji. day, to enjoy the cool breeze of evening; and their wild music and song, the shout of mirth and dancing, resounded along...

About this title

About the Author

Tim Flannery is a celebrated Australian mammalogist, palaeontologist and global warming activist. Flannery was named Australian of the Year in 2007 and is presently an adjunct professor at Macquarie University. He edited and introduced Canongate's internationally acclaimed edition of an eighteenth-century sailor's account of circumnavigating the globe (twice!), The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, published in 2000.

From Kirkus Reviews

The unaffected remembrances of an 18th-century mariner, eerie in their ability to make readers feel contiguous with the events, edited by Flannery (Throwim Way Leg, 1998, etc.). This is a remarkable memoir in that its author was neither famous nor infamous but a Common Joe who happened to attract the attention of a publisher interested in the lives of adventurers, to whom Nicol told his story. He was a sailor, though not, as Flannery puts it, ``of the rum, sodomy, and lash school.'' He was a ship's cooper and candlemaker, intimate with the below-decks world of slaves, convicts, and Chinese barbers. With a solid reputation and a widely appreciated touch for brewing spruce beer, Nicol was routinely requested to join voyages, managing to twice circumnavigate the world, engage in trade and discovery and strife, find a wife and then lose her as he fled the press gangs. Nicol had an eye and an ear for the background music of the everyday, of language (though surely tidied by Flannery for today's readers), and catches of verse and song or the work chant of West Indian slaves: ``Work away, body, bo / Work aa, jollaa.'' Equally appealing are his responses to wild landscapeshe doesn't bother with the heroic, as in this on Greenland: ``Desolation reigns around: nothing but snow, or bare rocks and ice. The cold is so intense and the weather often so thick. I feel so cheerless.'' And an immediacy rings in the account, pulling you in. ``The natives came on board in crowds and were happy to see us. They recognized Portlock and others who had been on the island before, along with Cook.'' That's Hawaii and that's Captain Cook. This memoir has seen two printings in Great Britain, one in 1822 and another in 1937, and it appears here now for the first time, the lucky find of treasure hunters who discovered a gem worth far more than its weight in gold doubloons. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gale and the British Library
• Publication date: 1822
• ISBN 10: 1535813172
• ISBN 13: 9781535813174
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226